Religion in New York's Public Schools in the Mid-19th Century

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THE CONTROVERSY OVER RELIGION IN NEW YORK’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MID-19TH CENTURY
The year 1840-43 was the time of the New York School controversy which, created a huge impact on Catholic parochial education. The leaders of that time and the authority figures have different takes and other intentions about the educational system. This paper intends to analyze certain elements of the controversy by examining the work of John Joseph Hughes, the first Archbishop during the crisis. His work offers an opportunity to explore the narrative with the details. The noted major events provide the context about how the Catholic Church responded to the scandals and the media that was perpetuating it into mass consciousness. Cultural history and traditional appropriation play a huge role in giving the issue a framework for understanding. This paper will focus on the context and how it can be correlated to modern political situations with regards to present issues, and their relation to the past.
The law and the constitution have a big responsibility in integrating clashing opinions regarding public education. One relevant idea regarding the topic comes from Justice Stewart, who reveals a fundamental problem regarding the Supreme Court’s action regarding religious neutrality in public education. The rule that is being implied is that schools should not be a place for religious speech, however, people can never be barred from having religious queries. In religious matters, it is hard to arrive at only a single unifying concept due to the presence of various contradicting ideologies, or rather, concepts that are taken from different syntaxes, such as secularism, atheism, and even agnosticism. The Court was able to hold a jurisprudential position that a religious perspective is different from a secular outlook that relies on empirical pieces of evidence instead of theories of the unseen. The Court somehow argues that an education system is a place for neutral and amoral facts and logical knowledge. Most Americans have accepted this as a fact, but there is undeniable, something lacking and unacknowledged. For a religious or spiritual individual, a certain drive about their seeking leads them to questions hunger for understanding. Generally, the law cannot stop a person from wondering about things that could be empirically unknowable, and that academic environments have a responsibility to provide opportunities to address such questions.
American public education has been established through the fundamental goals of the American people. During the 19th century, the educational design was modified to cater to cultural and political assimilation. Pluralist democracy offered an opportunity to establish institutions where children from different races, and religions can come together and study fundamental knowledge about the world and society. The Supreme Court’s effort to exclude religious speech from public schools supports the idea that secularism is similar to religious neutrality. The court has formed a historical narrative that pinpoints the exclusive version of state neutrality in the ideology of the constitutional founding. According to this narrative, the framers—particularly Thomas J...